When the TV is the only light source in a dark room, your eyes have to struggle to adjust to the rapid changes in light.
It turns out that watching TV in a dimly lit bedroom isn’t the best home tradition, but how bad is it really for your eye health?
What do the studies say about it?
In 2006, scientists at the Lighting Research Center, the largest university lighting research center in the United States, decided to checkwhether reducing the brightness contrast between the display and the general background will help reduce eye strain and fatigue.
“Eye strain can occur when the eyes are fixed on an object for long periods of time in low or bright light,” explains John Bullough, lighting specialist at the LRC and lead researcher.
“One cause of eye strain is watching TV in a dark room. In this case, the visual discomfort is caused by a large difference in brightness between the television screen and the dark background of the room,” she adds.
How did the search go?
Study participants had to watch an action movie for an hour on a flat-screen TV. Half of them first watched the movie with the lights on and then took a break before watching another hour of the movie without the lights on. The second group followed the same procedure, but in reverse order.
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Before and after watching the film, all subjects completed tasks in which they had to respond to visual tasks by pressing a button. During the tasks, the researchers monitored the electrical brain activity of the participants and noted the changes between the start and the end of each session.
While the subjects watched TV, the researchers monitored the frequency of the eyelids. They also questioned and observed the participants to assess the effect of ambient lighting on the subjects’ subjective feelings.
What did you find?
As it turned out, ambient lighting helped reduce eye discomfort, fatigue, eye strain, and blink frequency.
“Each of these answers is consistent with the hypothesis that ambient lighting reduces eye strain and eye strain,” says Yukio Akashi, LRC senior researcher and design team member. “However, statistically significant differences between the two conditions were only able to demonstrate subjective ratings of the participants’ concentration difficulty and sleepiness, as well as a reduction in the duration between the onset of the stimulus and the electrophysiological response of the brain.”
Overall, the results show that there is a slightly negative effect of watching TV in a dark room, but no real harm was found. According to the LRC researchers, the findings are consistent with previous literature supporting the concept of limiting the ratio of brightness between display and ambient light.
Is it harmful to watch TV in the dark?
While there’s no medical evidence that watching TV actually has a negative impact on eye health, studies show that it causes eye strain and eye strain, which can lead to a general feeling of tiredness and headaches.
Therefore, it is recommended to watch TV in a well-lit room, the same applies to the use of PCs, laptops and mobile devices.
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